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Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Latin American History and director of Latin American studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the John Carter Brown Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has written twenty books and sixty articles and essays on the histories of the Mayas, of Africans in Spanish America, and of the Spanish Conquest. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife and the youngest of his four daughters.
When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History
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ISBN-13:
9780062427281
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 01/30/2018
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 560
- Sales rank: 233,908
- File size: 18 MB
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A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the Americas
On November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of Cortés’s bold and brilliant military genius. Montezuma, on the other hand, is remembered as a coward who gave away a vast empire and touched off a wave of colonial invasions across the hemisphere.
But is this really what happened? In a departure from traditional tellings, When Montezuma Met Cortés uses “the Meeting”—as Restall dubs their first encounter—as the entry point into a comprehensive reevaluation of both Cortés and Montezuma. Drawing on rare primary sources and overlooked accounts by conquistadors and Aztecs alike, Restall explores Cortés’s and Montezuma’s posthumous reputations, their achievements and failures, and the worlds in which they lived—leading, step by step, to a dramatic inversion of the old story. As Restall takes us through this sweeping, revisionist account of a pivotal moment in modern civilization, he calls into question our view of the history of the Americas, and, indeed, of history itself.
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Library Journal
01/01/2018Restall (director, Latin American studies, Pennsylvania State Univ.; Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest) attempts to set the record straight on the 1519 meeting of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and Aztec emperor Montezuma, and the events preceding and following the encounter. He starts from the position that the record is heavily skewed in favor of Cortés and that these initial judgments have been passed down uncritically for centuries, acquiring a veneer of truth because they have been frequently reiterated. In this alternate telling, Montezuma was in control of events, not the conquistadors or Cortés. Restall addresses a number of myths; among them, that Cortés burned his ships to ground his troops, and that Montezuma ceded sovereignty to the Spaniard The author maintains that the battles for Tenochtitlan were less climatic than stated, and that the conflict was part of a longer Mesoamerican contest that lasted until 1550. Restall sometimes weakens his case by overstating it. Some of his surmises are just that, reasoned guesses, and the often-sarcastic tone does not help his argument. VERDICT Readers interested in the history of the Conquista will be attracted to this book, but may be disappointed in the results.—David Keymer, Cleveland
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/13/2017Restall (The Conquistadors), director of Latin-American studies at Penn State, makes an impressive and nuanced case for why radically reinterpreting the Nov. 8, 1519, encounter between Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés and Aztec emperor Montezuma leads to a totally different view of the following four centuries. “The Meeting,” as Restall dubs it, is the founding myth of Latin-American history, an event that inhabits the liminal space between history and legend. What is known about the meeting has been gleaned almost entirely from one source: 16th-century foot-soldier Bernal Díaz’s True History of New Spain, which Restall argues is neither true nor strictly historical. Using his knowledge of the Nahuatl language to revisit forgotten texts and parse eyewitness accounts of the Aztecs’ “surrender,” Restall strips away layers of accumulated historical sediment to reveal a meeting that looks very different from the version found in history textbooks and memorialized in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. According to Restall, the meeting wasn’t a turning point but rather merely one moment in the Spanish-Aztec War, a brutal two-year struggle historically whitewashed in favor of an account that justifies and reinforces the European presence in the Americas and became the foundation for a false history of indigenous weakness and European superiority. Blending erudition with enthusiasm, Restall has achieved a rare kind of work—serious scholarship that is impossible to put down. Illus. (Jan.)
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Matthew Restall illuminates every topic he touches. His new book is the best study ever—the subtlest, most sensitive, most challenging, and best-informed—on the conquest of Mexico.Charles Mann
A new, startlingly persuasive picture of what actually happened during the Spanish Conquest, based on a radical question: What if the tough, canny leaders of these native military empires didn’t suddenly fold up like wet cardboard at the arrival of a couple of hundred bearded oddities from some faraway place?Louis S. Warren
In a deeply learned history that reads like a detective story, Restall reveals the Gordian knot of myth and fiction that have long hidden the real history of the encounter between Montezuma and Cortes. The history of the Americas will never be the same.” Kirkus Reviews
2017-10-02A methodical deconstruction of the myths surrounding Hernando Cortés' "Mexican conquest" and the surrender of Montezuma.Restall's (Latin American History/Pennsylvania State Univ.; The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan, 2013, etc.) main point is that the more you shift the point of view, the more is revealed. The traditional story fits the bill for all Western universal narratives in which civilizations are victorious over barbarism, thereby justifying invasion. The same goes for the usual claims that the natives were cannibals and sodomists, all used to make the victors look good. The story of Cortés landing in Mexico, being treated as a god, and accepting Montezuma's "surrender" to the great king of Spain is fiction. The author looks at the small force Cortés brought from Cuba to explore the coastline and sees an outnumbered group, fighting among themselves and overstepping their orders. He also reminds us of the "black legend" of the conquistadors as vicious, bloodthirsty murderers and slavers. The myth of Cortés is based almost entirely on his second letter (the first is lost) to the Spanish king in which his claims are nothing but fabrications. At the time of writing, he and his men were guests of Montezuma and nowhere near subduing this highly civilized people. It is the case of the victor writing the history, and Cortés' letter was the basis for it. Even more interesting is Restall's view of emperor Montezuma, whom history has called a coward. The author makes an excellent case for a strong leader of a civilization of tens of thousands in a city with gardens, palaces, and even a zoo at least a century before any European court. There was no need for him to fear the few hundred Spanish, and he was most likely toying with them, unaware of the cruel treachery that would result. Throughout, Restall's assertions are well-supported and difficult to refute, and the timeline that opens the book is particularly helpful.An engaging revisionist exploration of "one of human history's great lies."